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Nov 22, 2021

What I know now — how to find the idea?

Tom Hosiawa • 1 min read

The idea of creating a startup started on a day in September 2019 with a few friends. You get together, bring your ideas and talk. You do it for a few months and try to force the idea out of nothing.

Turn to today. What I know now is you can’t force it.

First, you need to understand yourself. Someone made a great suggestion; let’s all do a self-assessment. So we all wrote what we love doing, what we’re great at, what our weaknesses and biases are, what’s our end goal.

Why is this so important? You’ll quit if you don’t love it. You won’t prioritize time if you don’t love it. Like is not enough.

Second, listen to be curious. Third, be patient, and let it come to you.
Two years later, it’s July 2021, I started the Coursera Machine Learning course. Some parts were really hard for me. Even though I thought I understood, I didn’t know how to start the first assignment. Twice! Not even after rewatching and redoing my notes. And I’m an excellent note-taker these days. Yet, I was a complete blank!!

The third time around, I tried something different and realized one thing that made me stuck is I didn’t realize

two math formula of the cost function J

This and a couple other things I didn’t realize made me work 10+ hours straight. Trying to figure out why I couldn’t start.

A couple weeks later, I was listening to David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, and something interesting came up.

Quote from David and Goliath "In spring of her sophomore year, she enrolled in organic chemistry—and things only got worse. She couldn't do it: "You memorize how a concept works, and then they give you a molecule you've never seen before, and they ask you to make another one you've never seen before, and you have to get from this thing to that thing. There are people who just think that way and in five minutes are done. They're the curve busters. Then there are people who through an amazing amount of hard work trained themselves to think that way. I worked so hard and I never got it down."

So I’m not the only one! And the first opportunity for a startup came to be.
Have you ever felt stuck, slow, behind, or didn’t belong?